Electronic-commerce began before personal computers were prevalent and has now grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. “E-commerce” is a term used to describe the activity of doing business on the Internet and it includes business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer transactions that involves the sale of goods and services.
Business-to-business transactions (documents) are now common among many companies that accomplish business-to-business transactions through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In order to communicate, however, documents must be structured and understood by the parties to the transaction. For instance, there are many different structures such as a billing structure, a purchase order structure, a status order structure and many more that must be understood by the parties to the transaction.
As e-commerce evolved, different industries adopted different structures and standards. For example, the health care industry that may communicate with a pharmaceutical industry regarding a patient through the Internet has adopted a document standard called HL7. In comparison, the pharmaceutical industry has adopted a different document standard. As a result of adoption of different standards by different industries, business-to-business transactions cannot be fully automated and the document standard by one industry is not understood by another industry. Other examples include sharing documents electronically between laboratories and insurance companies, or when the passport office communicates with another department in order to obtain electronic information about a birth certificate of an individual. There are a number of different document standards used by different industries including EDI, EDI X12, EDI EDIFECS, HL7 and many more. A problem exists because numerous industries use e-commerce and numerous different standards are now available.
Even if documents are standardized, security and reliability of documents being transmitted is a concern given privacy issues and the importance of information being transmitted such as financial information. There are three factors associated with security and reliability. First, the message must be authenticated to ensure that a non-party to the transaction has not altered the message or the document being transmitted. Second, there must be a guarantee that the document or message has been delivered. Finally, the communicated document or message must be kept confidential between the parties to the transaction. Some of the exchange standards currently used to transmit documents include AS2, eb XML, and RNIF.
As the number of document standards and exchange standards for transmitting documents securely and reliably grows, messages combine different document standards with different exchange standards. The need to mix and match various standards depends on the particular needs of the parties to the transaction. Consequently, as number of document standards and number of exchange standards increases, the need to mix and match these standards increases as well in order to provide the parties with the flexibility to choose various standards according to their particular needs.